do you feel?"
"Feet are cold. Stomach's on fire. I want to scream actually."
"Scream, then," Dion said. "Ain't no one else around."
Joe did. The force of it shocked him. It echoed all over the hotel.
"Feel better?"
"You know what?" Joe said. "No."
"Then don't do it again. Well, he's on his way. The doc'."
"You bring him with you?"
Dion nodded. "He's on the boat. Sal's already hit the signal light by now. He'll be motoring up to the dock lickety-split."
"That's good."
"Why didn't you make some kind of noise when he put it in? We couldn't fucking see you up there. We just kept waiting for the signal."
"I don't know," Joe said. "It seemed important not to give him the satisfaction. Oh, Jesus, this hurts."
Dion gave him his hand and Joe clenched it.
"Why'd you let him get so close if you weren't going to stab him?"
"So what?"
"So close? With the knife? You were supposed to stab him."
"I shouldn't have shown him those pictures, D."
"You showed him pictures?"
"No. What? No. I mean Figgis. I shouldn't have done it."
"Christ. That's what we had to do to put this fucking mad dog down."
"It's not the right price."
"But it's the price. You don't go letting this piece of shit stab you because the price is the price."
"Okay."
"Hey. Stay awake."
"Stop slapping my face."
"Stop closing your eyes."
"It's going to make a nice casino."
"What?"
"Trust me," Joe said.
Chapter Twenty
Mi Gran Amor
Five weeks.
That's how long he spent in a hospital bed. First in the Gonzalez Clinic on Fourteenth, just up the block from the Circulo Cubano, and then, under the alias Rodriguo Martinez, at the Centro Asturiano Hospital twelve blocks east. The Cubans might have fought with the Spaniards and the southern Spaniards might have fought with the northern Spaniards, and all of them had their beefs with the Italians and the American Negroes, but when it came to medical care, Ybor was a mutual aid collective. Everyone down there knew that no one in white Tampa would lift a finger to stop up a hole in their hearts if there was a Caucasian nearby who needed treatment for a fucking hangnail.
Joe was worked on by a team that Graciela and Esteban assembled - a Cuban surgeon who performed the original laparotomy, a Spanish specialist in thoracic medicine who oversaw the abdominal wall reconstruction during the second, third, and fourth surgeries, and an American doctor on the forefront of pharmacology who had access to the tetanus toxoid vaccine and regulated the administering of the morphine.
All the initial work done on Joe - the irrigation, cleansing, exploration, debridement, and suturing - had been done at the Gonzalez Clinic, but word slipped out he was there. Midnight riders of the KKK showed up the second night, galloping their horses up and down Ninth, the oily stench of their torches climbing through the window grates. Joe wasn't awake for any of this - he would never have more than scant recollection of the first two weeks after the stabbing - but Graciela would tell him all about it during the months of his recovery.
When the riders departed, thundering out of Ybor along Seventh and firing their rifles in the air, Dion sent men to follow them - two men per horse. Just before dawn, unknown assailants entered the homes of eight local men across the Greater Tampa/St. Petersburg area and beat those men nearly to death, some in front of their families. When a wife intervened in Temple Terrace, they broke her arms with a bat. When a son in Egypt Lake tried to impede them, they tied the boy to a tree and let the ants and mosquitoes have at him. The most prominent of the victims, the dentist Victor Toll, was rumored to have replaced Kelvin Beauregard as the head of the town Klavern. Dr. Toll was tied to the hood of his car. He was forced to lie there in a soup of his blood and smell his own house burn to the ground.
This effectively ended the power of the Ku Klux Klan in Tampa for three years, but the Pescatore Family and the Coughlin-Suarez Gang had no way of knowing that, so they took no chances and moved Joe to the Centro Asturiano Hospital. There a surgical drain was inserted to offset the internal bleeding, the source of which mystified the original doctor, which is why they sent for the second doctor, a gentle Spaniard with the most beautiful fingers Graciela had ever seen.
By this point, Joe was mostly out of danger for